Recently, the automotive industry has been faced with the challenge of designing a vehicle airbag deployment system which can inhibit deployment of the airbag in situations where allowing deployment increases the likelihood of causing harm to an occupant, such as where a rear-facing infant seat is located in the front passenger seat. Examples of such attempts or proposals include: (1) manually actuated switches for enabling/disabling air bags; (2) magnetic or inductive "tags" that must be affixed to a rear-facing infant seat; and (3) capacitance sensors to distinguish humans from inanimate objects, or weight threshold sensors that disable the air bag below a predetermined threshold weight (such as 25 pounds).
However, none of these arrangements has proven entirely satisfactory. More specifically, manually actuated switches are subject to human forgetfulness or inattention. Tag systems have to be retroactively affixed to all existing rear-facing infant seats. Capacitive and weight sensing systems have not achieved acceptable levels of reliability.